Search This Blog

Pages

A Summer Craft and a Sneek Peek at The Lord of the Flies

This craft was so awesome, it deserved its own post, but I did not actually get around to it until now (hangs head in shame). However, I hope someone can use it next summer, or maybe for a beach party craft in March. Why not?

During the beach party, I created sand tables by taping rolled newspaper all the way around one of our activity tables and then covering it in plastic tablecloths, which I then taped to the table as well. I got that idea from a librarian who used that idea with her Lego crafts.

The clay kept overnight in plastic containers with a wet paper towel tucked in there. In fact, it was so moist, I had to air it out a bit before the craft.

We shaped the castles by hand, and I supplied shells, toothpicks and triangles cut from construction paper (for flags) as well as glue sticks. Everyone was told to work tiny, as these bad boys take forever to dry. I gave everyone a paper plate (cake serving size) and wrote their name in sharpie for the kids to place the castles on when finished. I put them on a cart to dry and to free the kids up to move onto other things when they were done.

Some kids really got into making castles, I would say the majority of them. Others, and I thought this was cool, created instead a flat disc-like platform and pressed the shells into the clay making what looked like a seashore stone. Very cute!

This craft was for 6 to 12 year olds and they had a great time. Except for time, I was only out the cost of some baking soda. The sand I borrowed from my backyard (pool sand). This was a lot of fun, but I would not recommend it for little ones.Now, my entire break from school (the lousy twenty days) has been filled with brainstorming for my Teen Craft. We are covering Banned Books, and they chose (at the Mockingjay Party) to read the Lord of the Flies.

We will have a mini-lecture (bio of Golding, WWII backdrop, major themes......) done on Power Point, with a few minutes of the Simpsons episode "Das Bus" to show the popularity of LOF in pop culture today.

Purchasing pre-cut art sets and putting them together is not crafting (it is future assembly-line worker training. Everyone leaves with a product that looks EXACTLY like everyone else's).

Discussions are great but can be boring.

The point of coming to the library on your own time is to learn something in such a way that you are not bored.

Taking home a piece of what was discussed is important and meaningful, and I'm sorry, but photocopies of information and cheesy bookmarks do not cut it.

AND, the kids tend to talk to one another while crafting without looking to me to be moderator. In fact, they tend to forget I am in the room and that is what I want. Library bonding!!

So, how does one craft The Lord of the Flies?

I'll show ya!

We revive the ancient art of the diorama!!!! and then, make it cooler.

We take an oatmeal canister and paint it black. Then we cut a door into the front. Label the can with the book's title and mention the author!

For the door knob we use a gold brad (fastener) and a black springy hair tie. Both punches made with a hole puncher. Pretty easy!

Open the door and we have the Lord of the Flies, dramatic final signal fire showdown. Or close to it. I printed out a picture of a tropic sunset, a picture of boys playing on a beach, and a picture of a campfire. I cut out the shapes, leaving about a half inch on the bottom to fold up and staple onto the base (the base is a styrofoam bowl upside down and a circle of black card stock measured to fit inside the canister. Pretty easy!! I used a stapler to secure the images to the base because glue was not cutting it. I did not glue the base down until I was satisfied with the placement of the boys and the fire.

An aside, it was so sunny today and I took these photos outside and the fire really looks like it is on fire, but I assure you it is just glare.

Then, I started showing the finished product off to my family and my brother says we need to "pimp" it. He returns a minute later with an LCD light that sticks to the roof of the canister. AND IT IS AWESOME!!!!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

This post is my progress report on my self-challenge to read all of the 2017 Nebula nominees! So far, I have completed the short story category and most of the the novelettes. I have 3 novellas and 3 novels to go.

Nebula Award Nominees 2017- Short Stories

What fun! I would never have read any of these stories on my own, although I expect some of these will show up in some future anthologies.
I have one personal gripe, and this will come up again in another category, and that is the death of the horror genre. Because they have just killed "horror" and lumped scary stories in with science fiction and fantasy, we get stories like SabbathWine trying to compete with Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies and it's not fair. It really is apples and oranges. Don't believe me about horror? Go find the horror section in the Barnes and Noble. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Griping over, this selection of stories was AWESOME and heavy on the fantasy stories. Seasons and Wardrobe are fan…

I am on a mission to read all of the Nebula Award Nominees before the awards are presented on May 20th. This was prompted by the fact that I see these awards all of the time and I have only recently gotten hooked on science fiction so I think it is important to understand what the community thinks is the best of the best. I plan to do the exact same thing for the Hugos, but I have time.
Unlike childrens' book awards, in which awards do not in any way equal popularity, readers seem to like to award favorites.

It's no secret I am just crazy about N.K. Jemisin and her writing. Honestly it is because of she and Kameron Hurley and Becky Chambers and Jacqueline Koyanagi and Charlie Jane Anders and John Scalzi and James S.A. Corey (both of them) that I find myself absolutely loving this genre. I have NO desire to go back and read early science fiction with dorky cartoon covers featuring sexy aliens and white dudes holding Jetson-esque blasters. I want to read forward. I like where …

I'm about to hit you with a group game that 1. costs very little money to make 2. sounds a lot harder than it actually is. Ready? Okay!

This summer we will be playing Seize the City. It's modeled after my game Seize the Castle. The only thing changing here are the trivia questions will now be super hero themed and instead of a castle in the center, there will be a "city". Something akin to this: Image borrowed from Etsy for visual aid purpose only. My teen volunteers will actually be making the city from scratch and it will look however they want it to :)

Because this game already exists in castle form, you will just have to use your imagination.
And because NO Thing is really original here is what started me on the path to Seize the Castle greatness: http://www.ellenjmchenry.com/homeschool-freedownloads/math-games/stormthecastle.php

The Game:

You will need:

Up to 20 players
2 mats with grids taped out on them
1 cardboard/foam core castle (or city, for summer)
Thre…